Open Source is Serious Business for Exadel Customers

By John K. Waters

08/09/2005

Here's a statistic worthy of a doubletake: According to Exadel, every Fortune
1000 firm has downloaded its tools—at least to kick the tires.

"This says, of course, very good things about our technology," says
Fima Katz, the company's founder and CEO, "but I think there is a larger
and more important meaning, and that is that these companies are either using
or considering open source."

Exadel builds tools that use the Eclipse platform to leverage Struts, JavaServer
Faces, Hibernate, Spring and other open-source technologies for business solutions.
The company has just announced availability of the latest version of its Web
application development suite. Based on Eclipse 3.1, Exadel Studio Pro 3.0 comes
with new visual project and component editors, rich project navigation and continuous
program verification. By combining visual and source-oriented development approaches
with support for multiple open-source technologies, the tool enables developers
to work with multiple frameworks all under one roof.

"These companies aren't interested in open source because it's free,"
Katz tells Java Trends. "It's not free, though it is cost effective.
The people we talk to want open source because of the innovation is promotes
with the development model, and because it frees them from vendor lock-in."

Katz launched Exadel in 1998 with the goal of making corporate software applications
more adaptable. Toward that end, the company developed a set of design and deployment
engines for creating new software functionality by rapidly repackaging existing
software functionality.

Based on those design and deployment engines, Studio Pro comes with features
including:

- New Hibernate mapping tools that allow developers to create advanced database
mapping for Web applications with little or no knowledge of Hibernate coding:

Full support for forward, reverse and "meet-at-the-middle" engineering
approaches

Mapping validator with Quick Fix function

Support for refactoring between Java and Hibernate mapping metadata

Specialized wizards for all the different aspects of object/relational mapping,
including field and class auto-mapping with a unique incremental functionality
(Named Queries, Fetch Strategy, Class Cache, DDL generation and Hibernate
configuration wizards)